March 26, 2004 by s.z.

"Slip one of those to your poppet and you'd get a crisply worded note" Time again to visit the wacky world of the World's Worst Mother® (registered trademark of Tbogg Inc. -- remember Tbogg for all your snark needs).  We also need to check in on her four adorable munchkins: Guenevere, Gurkha, Guernsey, and Sponge-Ron (named after Meghan's favorite President, and the birth control failure that made the poppet possible), and see if they're still alive. Tom has reviewed the source material, and he does us proud with The care and feeding of poppets, probably the best piece ever written on how the Gurdonettes were conceived.  But of course, there are always two sides to every story: Meghan's, and the law's.  And here another one. The Parental Pirate Revolution After a few medicinal gins and tonics, Meghan gets philosophical.  The majority of mummies live lives of quiet desperation, she perceives, what with all the packing and unpacking of lunchboxes.  Sure, the oppression of womankind by lunchboxes may seem trivial to YOU, but it's just the kind of thing that can make a mother snap and start throwing Molotov cocktails at the ruling class neighbors.  It is, as Meghan puts it, "a kind of bamboo splinter driven daily under the fingernails of the bourgeoisie."  Meghan decides it's revolution time!  Mummies of the world, unite and throw out your lunchboxes: you have nothing to lose but your parental rights! See, it didn't always used to be like this.  There was a time when a hungover housewife could throw some rabbit pellets (hey, they have vitamins and fiber) in a My Little Pony lunchbox and get back to napping.  But then the school starting sending home snotty letters about the food pyramid and "clear signs of neglect," and then Child Welfare weenies came by (again), and now feeding the poppets is more trouble than it's worth. Meghan sees this as a universal problem: On any given Sunday night, across the country, millions of weary parents will kiss their children goodnight, turn off the lights, walk back into the kitchen, and smack their foreheads in dismay. "Aargh, lunchboxes," is roughly what will go through their minds. Arrrgh! indeed.  So Meghan decides to lead a Parental Pirate uprising.  Their first target will be the neighboring Japanese embassy, to get back at the Japanese for having polite, docile children who eat bean curd and turnips without complaining, while Guenevere and Sponge-Ron refused to even try the slimemold and dryer lint sandwiches that their devoted mummy made them last week. Of course, OTHER parents -- overly permissive, lazy, COMPETENT parents -- just buy their kids Lunchables.  But Meghan has nothing but contempt for people like them.  As it says in the Bible, "Let them eat cake, and spoil the child."  Or something like that.  Meghan's head feels like it's going to explode, so she's damned well not going to bother to look up quotes. But in any case, it's a hard life for the non-Lunchables mummy.  She roots desperately throughout the house for food and food-like substances she can throw into a lunchbox.  Look, there's some leftover Chinese take-out from New Years in the back of the fridge!  That will work for Guenevere.  Now, to find something for Sponge-Ron.  Hmm, he can have the box of baking soda.  And some wallpaper samples -- hey, if roaches can survive for years on wallpaper paste, so can kids.  It's just commonsense.  Besides, if you give kids real food, they just waste it.  Or so Meghan's friends say. Casting a longing look at the peanut butter — now a banned substance — they make some other sandwich; dig out a piece of fruit, maybe some cookies. Many hours later a child opens the lunch box, takes a few desultory bites of the apple, gouges out the soft underbelly of the sandwich, leaving the crusts, and closes the box again. Some hours further on, a parent will open the now-sticky box and pitch out the squashed, room temperature, salmonella-seething leftovers. Small violins will play in the back of the parent's mind as he thinks, "There goes the sweat of my brow." See, food is wasted on the young!  And anyway, the schools are breeding grounds for salmonella, so it's better not to send the youngsters anything on which germs might grow.  Inorganic compounds are your best bet. But Meghan has heard rumors that Guenevere is selling her tungsten nuggets and cripsy magnesium strips on the black-market, and putting the proceeds in a Swiss bank account.  Meghan decides a little friendly questioning about lunches is in order, and seats the two older children on unstable kitchen chairs (all the chairs are unstable, but this time is works out to Meghan's advantage) and shines a bright light in their eyes. To cut down on waste, fraud, and abuse, I periodically sit Molly and Paris down to learn how best to cater to their evolving palates. Notebook is at the ready, we begin. "Now, children, you both like applesauce, don't you?" If the kids answer "yes," then she has them -- because it would prove that they've been eating from somebody else's lunchbox.  Probably the lunchbox of that hussy, the Capable Mother.  For months that bitch has been trying to seduce Meghan's children into liberalism with promises of "music," "dance," and "applesauce." But the wily Guenevere and Sponge-Ron don't fall into the trap, and claim they like exotic substances like raisins and water.  Now Meghan is stumped: who in the hell would be feeding her kids water? Maybe the Canadians.  The damned Canadians are even worse than the PTA Nazis, because the Canadians make you feed your kids AND recycle.  Thank God Meghan and the kids were able to slip under the Maple Curtain and escape to freedom.  Thinking back, Meghan realizes that the reason she hasn't seen Hugo in years might be because he was shot by the border patrol. Meghan tunes back to the present and asks the kids if they like cheese.  Because if they do, they could dress up like old people and stand in line for the government cheese giveaways at the senior center.  They could each take a 5-pound brick to school, and the question of lunch would be solved for the month. However, Sponge-Ron has a violent reaction to the subject of cheese. "Only melted," he cries, suddenly scarlet with emotion. "Wow, okay, no cheese for you." More notation. Well, she muses, she probably should have remembered that Sponge-Ron saw his twin sister, IUDeeDee, die in a horrible cheese-related accident.  Meghan decides to devote a page in the notebook to the dead and MIA children and the accidents that took them, to avoid further faux pas like the cheese one. Anyway, "no cheese for you" reminds Guenevere of a favorite Seinfeld ep, and she asks for soup.  Meghan decides to humor her, and says she'll pack some soup for her lunch.  Porridge, soup -- pretty much the same thing.  But Sponge-Ron says he hates soup.  Will these kids never stop with their incessant demands?  And then Meghan recalls that she has TWO OTHER CHILDREN, and someday they will need to be fed too.  Will the madness never end?!? This is when Meghan decides to bag the revolution, and just get drunk.  And once she passes out, little Gurkha and Guernsey roll her for change, and spend the proceeds on enough milk, lentils, and carrots to survive another day.  They are also planning a revolution.  And the nursery will run red with blood when the glorious day arrives, believe you me! 8:11:31 PM

Slap and Tickle With Bill O'Reilly, W, and Reverend Moon Here's a pargraph from Bill O'Reilly's latest column about how nobody (but him) seems to care that several jounalists, including his new archenemy Frank Rich, had an unpublicized meeting with John Kerry in December: The exposure of the liberal journalists who met with Kerry received scant attention from the media. Can you image if executives from The Fox News Channel, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Times had gathered at Camp David for a little slap and tickle with W? ...and nobody was told about it?  And The New York Times found out about it? Can you say PAGE ONE BOLD FACE HEADLINE?    Per A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquialisms of the UK, here's a definition of "slap and tickle": Noun. A lighthearted sexual liason. {Informal}.   So, if the NY Times found out that George W. was engaging in slap and tickle with Peter Kann, Roger Ailes (the evil one), and Reverend Moon, yes, it would be PAGE ONE BOLD FACE HEADLINE.  And rightfully so, because group, gay, rightwing sex sells papers! Oh, and here's another bit of British slang that reminded me of Bill: "face like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle":  Phrs. Very unnattractive. Cf. 'face like a bulldog chewing a wasp'.  Oh, and speaking of the Reverend Moon, if you ever want to read some crazy stuff, go to The Unification Homepage.  Here are a few passages, taken more or less at random, from a speech given in 1993: .Jesus and John [the Baptist] were like brothers. They were to restore brotherhood. Mary and Elizabeth were sisters. Who was Jesus' father? (Zechariah.) How do you know? (You told us.) I didn't tell you that! (Laughter.) So John the Baptist and Jesus had the same father. This is a problem. Israel at that time had a law that children of the same father could not marry. This relationship is incest. Mary had sexual intercourse with the husband of her sister. Elizabeth invited Mary, then Mary made that love relationship. That was how Jesus was conceived. John the Baptist was supposed to follow Jesus as the Messiah, and then he was supposed to offer his own sister to be the bride of Jesus. Zechariah was supposed to understand that point, too, but he did not. Elizabeth did not permit it. Even Mary forsook her position. So how could Jesus obtain his bride? Where was she going to come from? [When Jesus yelled at his mother at the Marriage of Cana, it was because Mary wanted him to make wine for the wedding, and yet HE didn't get to have his own wedding.  It was so unfair.  So Jesus never married and couldn't become the Messiah, which is why Reverend Moon had to do it.  But then America didn't accept him like they were supposed to after WWII, so now Moon is really ticked at America and at Christianity.  So, he created the movie Inchon and The Washington Times.]  In 1976, virtually every element in the world was opposing our movement. That situation could be overcome only by love and the desire for their salvation, not by revenge. We created the movie Inchon centered on General MacArthur to help revive the spirit of patriotism in America. Likewise, The Washington Times was created to help in America's salvation. In these ways we loved the enemies that were persecuting us. Yes, it was tough, stupid, really annoying love, but I guess we had it coming to us.  6:29:22 AM